This is the second movie in Krzystztof Kieślowski’s great Colours trilogy, now on rerelease; here white is the colour of death, the colour of winter, the colour of orgasm (a climactic, screen-filling flash of pleasure) and also the colour of a clean slate and a fresh start about to be muddied and spoiled. Theoretically, it addresses not just the middle colour of the French flag, but the second tenet of the revolution as well – equality – which it does by dramatising some outrageous inequality. It also satirises the specious new equality and meritocracy of gangster capitalism, on the rise in post-Soviet Poland.
Working again with composer Zbigniew Preisner, Kieślowski audaciously jolts the tone away from the dreamy, tragic and cosmic loneliness of Blue (whose protagonist, Juliette Binoche, is glimpsed again here) to a vinegary black comedy of marital breakdown, poverty and immigrant anxiety; it also contains one of the biggest, bleakest laugh lines in European cinema. Karol, the poverty-stricken Polish hairdresser in Paris has no money or passport, and finds he can only get back to Poland by stowing away in a trunk belonging to a Polish acquaintance. In Warsaw, this expensive-looking trunk is stolen by crooked baggage handlers who are furious to find only a homeless man inside. After being savagely beaten, Karol looks around at a snowy-white rubbish dump and gasps: “Home at last!” No one could accuse Kieślowski of romanticising his homeland.
Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol; his marriage to Dominique, acted with glacial hauteur by Julie Delpy, has ended in divorce due to non-consummation, with Karol’s erectile dysfunction mirroring the dysfunction all around him. Apparently exploiting her advantage as a French citizen against the alien Pole, Dominique vengefully freezes their bank account and even torches their hair salon, threatening to blame the arson on him. Hapless Karol is befriended by a lugubrious and melancholy fellow Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos) who leads him back to Poland and makes him a bizarre financial offer to get him back on his feet.
Back in the old country, Karol finds himself working for black market money-changers. He gets wind of western corporations intending to buy up valueless land thereabouts, moves like lightning to buy the land with Mikolaj’s cash and becomes a slick-haired capitalist himself, all the time dreaming of one day proving himself to Dominique with his new financial virility.
It’s an almost Jonsonian parable of an upwardly mobile hero with a downwardly mobile view on life: busking in the Paris metro, stowing away in luggage in the hold of a plane and becoming a shark-like entrepreneur wheeling and dealing in the new Polish business environment. Zamachowski’s sad, boyish performance is a droll counterpart to the worldly Mikołaj, a mysterious professional card player, wonderfully played by stage veteran Gajos. As for Dominique, it is a bit of a two-dimensional role (certainly compared to Binoche’s in the previous picture) and a rather male conception of villainous sexiness, but Delpy carries it off with panache.
What a strange confection White is – an opera of male agony and outrageously implausible picaresque adventure. Yet it succeeds amazingly on its own melodramatic terms.
• Three Colours White is released on 7 April in cinemas.
